1. Field of the Invention
Systems and methods for direct navigation to and/or highlighting a specific portion of a target document such as query-relevant portion of the document are disclosed.
2. Description of Related Art
When a user searches for information on the Internet by submitting a query to a search engine, the search engine returns a results page that often provides several hyperlinks to web pages that may be relevant to the user's query. Under each hyperlink, the results page typically also provides query-relevant information or text, often referred to as “snippets,” extracted from the webpage to which the corresponding hyperlink refers.
When the user clicks on a desired hyperlink on the search results page, the client browser typically navigates to the top of the target or destination webpage (or other document such as a Word, Excel or Portable Document Format (PDF) document, for example) to which the hyperlink refers. However, the target webpage may be long and/or the search query terms may be buried deep within the webpage. To locate the desired search terms, the user may perform a search for the desired text from within the web browser and/or manually (visually) search for the relevant information by scrolling through the webpage.
As an example, to find pizza places in or near zip code 94043, the user may search for “pizza” at zip code 94043 using Google's “Searching by Location” search engine currently located at http://labs.google.com/location (i.e., http://labs.google.com/location?q=pizza&geo_near=94043&Search=Google+Search) as shown in FIG. 1. An exemplary results page returned by the search engine is shown in FIG. 2 in which the first hyperlink 20 points to http://www.waiter.com/roundtable/ which contains a list of 35 pizza places in or near zip code 94043. In addition to the various hyperlinks, the search engine also provides a snippet 26 extracted from the webpage to which each hyperlink refers. As shown, certain text of each snippet 26 is in bold font so as to highlight certain text that may be useful as determined by the search engine. For the first hyperlink 20, the search engine highlights the text “Pizza 570 N. Shoreline Blvd. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.” of the snippet 26 in bold.
If the user clicks on the first-listed hyperlink 20, the client browser loads and displays the destination webpage 22 to which the hyperlink 20 refers at the top of the webpage 22, as shown in FIG. 3. However, the target document or webpage is typically not hosted or authored by the same entity as that of the search engine or other source or origin document such that the desired information is typically not propagated from the source document to the target document. Thus, for example, because the browser typically displays the webpage 22 at the top of the webpage 22, the restaurant that is in or closest to zip code 94043 may or may not be initially displayed within the browser. In the current example, the restaurant that is in or closest to zip code 94043, namely, the Round Table Pizza at 570 N. Shoreline Blvd. in Mountain View, Calif. is the tenth out of 35 listings on the destination webpage 22.
In order for the user to determine which of the listings is the most query-relevant listing, the user can determine as the user scrolls scroll through the 35 listings on the destination webpage 22 which of the listings is the one that is most relevant to the user's query, i.e., in or closest to zip code 94043. In the current example, the user must scroll down a number of screens before the query-relevant listing 24 is even displayed within the browser, as shown in FIG. 4. Alternatively, the user may take note of the content of the snippet 26 before navigating or clicking away from the results page (FIG. 2) and then search for (either visually by scrolling or by performing a text search from within the browser) the content of the snippet.
As is evident, each result on the search results page generated by the search engine only points to a webpage and not to anything more granular. In other words, the snippet generated by the search engine is only displayed to the user on the search results page and is not propagated or otherwise utilized to directly navigate to the desired location on the destination webpage.